cesses of Charles are shown in his suggestion of a
pleasant plan whereby Imlay could be lured back to England, arrested,
and with the assistance of a bumbailiff, marriage forced upon him. His
scheme was rejected by the obdurate Mary, who held that the very essence
of marriage was freedom.

The tragic humor of the action of Charles turns on his assumption that
his sister was "a fallen woman," and must be saved from disgrace. This
opinion was shared by various other shady respectables, who kept the
matter secret by lifting a soprano wail of woe from the housetops,
declaring that Mary had smirched their good names and those of their
friends by her outrageous conduct. These people also busied themselves
in spreading a report that Mary had gone into "French ways," it being
strongly held, then as now, by the rank and file of burly English
beef-eaters, male and female, that morality in France is an iridescent
dream--only that is not the exact expression they use.

Hope sank in the heart of the lone woman, and for a few weeks it
appeared that suicide was the only way out. As for parting with her
child, or with her brother Charles and his kin, Mary would stand by her
child. It is related that on one occasion her sister Everina came to
visit her, and Mary made bold to minister to her babe in the beautiful
maternal way sanctified by time, before bottle-babies became the vogue
and Nature was voted vulgar. The sight proved too much for Everina's
nerves, and she fainted, first loudly calling for the camphor.

The family din evidently caused Mary to go a step further than she
otherwise might, and she dropped the name Imlay and called herself plain
Mary Wollstonecraft, thus glorifying the disgrace. This increased
fortitude had come about by discovering that she could still work and
earn enough money to live on by proofreading and translations; and it
seemed that she had a head full of ideas. There in her lonely lodgings
at Blackfriars, in the third story back, she was writing "The Rights of
Woman." The book in places shows heat and haste, and its fault is not
that it leads people in the wrong direction, but that it leads them too
far in the right direction--that is, further than a sin-stained and
hypocritical world can follow.

When men deserve the ideal, it will be here. If mankind were honest and
unselfish, then every proposition held out by Mary Wollstonecraft would
hold true. Her book is a vindication, in one sense, of her own